September 14, 2013

On Sensory Nullification

Schüll argues that machine-gambling addicts become hooked on the
“zone” that machines can take them to, in which the contingencies and
inconveniences of human contact are eliminated, the pressure of being
rational and entrepreneurial in one’s life is suspended, and money’s
value is inverted. In short, it is a temporary antidote to the pressures
of neoliberal subjectivity — the calculating, rational self who must
constantly hustle and perform affective labor and prosume. Machine
gambling is a procedure for converting those pressures into their
opposite by indulging their logic completely. Something similar happens
with social-media use, which converts the pressures of social exposure —
the economic need for attention and the loss of privacy — into
something that feels managed.

Both the compulsions of machine gambling and the compulsions of
social-media checking, afford users a specific and limited sense of
control over a very precise set of choices and then simplifying the
possible outcomes. In Schüll’s words, these platforms let “individuals
use technology to manufacture ’certainties.’ “ Certainties is
in quotes because this type of technology use doesn’t allow us to
determine outcomes, only to choose the occasions when we seek
rewards. Schüll quotes a 1902 essay on gambling by Clemens France: “So
strong is the passion for the conviction of certainty that one is
impelled again and again to enter upon the uncertain in order to put
one’s safety to the test … Thus, paradoxical as it may sound, gambling
is a struggle for the certain and sure, i.e. the feeling of certainty.”

People gamble because they are seeking action,
a managed set of risks that distract us from the uncontrollable risks
of being in the world (of having an identity). Gambling-experience
design, as Schüll details in the book, is about continual modulation of
the player’s sensorium so as to maintain an continuous equilibrium
between sensation, distraction, control, and enchantment. Schüll notes
the asymmetry in the time horizons of gamblers and casino operators:
casino operators take the long view and use the mass of data they
collect to manage long-run profit. Gamblers, in seeking the “zone” of
satisfactory play, pursue a “perpetual present tense” whose horizon
extends only to the possibility of immediate gratification.

In a sense, the gambling transaction is a mechanism for trading the
long-term view, expanses over which it is much harder to manage and
sustain positive mood, for the short-term, in which mood is irrelevant
and there is only reactive sensation. As Schüll puts it, machine
gamblers operate by “affective adaptation rather than analytic
leverage.” They are looking to manage feeling and hack their brain’s
reward mechanisms, not pursue a Weberian rationality that might lead to
steady gains.

Another way to put that is that casinos, as corporate subjects, don’t
experience depression the way individual gamblers do, so casinos don’t
need the compensations of the zone but can instead sell it to those who
do. But they have no incentive to help anyone resolve depression, only
to make it “productive” — that is, a guarantor of a predictable profit
stream for the casino. So casinos collect data and develop technologies
and environments to cultivate and nurture depression in such a guise
that the depressed subject can’t recognize their depression for what it
is. This is how escapism-driven, “experience economy”–driven capitalism
works.

Social media works similarly, aiming to ensconce users in a total
environment that ministers to their anxieties by stimulating them in a
routinized fashion. The continuity social media supplies to users relies
not on sensory nullification, as with gaming machines (or opiates) but
on making connectivity ubiquitous, of being always on and responsive to
our flashes of social curiosity and anxiety. Is anyone thinking of me? What are people doing? Do I belong? Am I connected? These continuous processes allow us to digest our memories, experiences and fears and excrete commercially useful information.